HONDURAS: Underwater Duty

Still in striped pants and cutaway after attending ceremonies celebrating Honduras’ 136-year-old independence from Spain, U.S. Ambassador Whiting Willauer, 50, was just sitting down to lunch at the. embassy one day last week when he was summoned to the telephone. It was the governor of the province. At a treacherous swimming hole in the muddy Rio Quaccerique, just ten miles from town, a young swimmer had dived, struck a rock and disappeared under the swift currents. Could the ambassador be of any assistance?

Into the Mud. With the aplomb of a man who has had such a request before, the ambassador rounded up his equipment and loaded it into a police car that appeared out front. During the 15-minute ride, he shucked the striped pants and swallow-tailed coat, climbed into trunks. The car reached the spot where the Rio Quaccerique, loaded with silt from surrounding hills, whirls through a narrow gorge and widens to a rock-filled pool 100 ft. wide and 40 ft. deep. The ambassador was slightly worried; his best skin-diving equipment was still in Nantucket, where he had spent the summer. But he pulled on an ill-fitting tank of compressed air, a face mask with a broken strap, and stepped into the water. The mask leaked, and the water was so muddy that he “couldn’t see the glass in front of my face.” But on the sixth dive, groping through three feet of mud on the bottom, his hand touched the dead boy’s leg. Minutes later the ambassador had hauled the body up to the bank.

A native New Yorker, “Whitey” Willauer began his career as an admiralty lawyer, then moved into Government service as an investigator. In World War II he directed U.S. aid to the Far East, after V-J day stayed on to organize CAT airline with General Claire Chennault. Squeezed out of control of the line by financial troubles in 1950, he remained as president and vice-chairman of the board until three years ago, when he became Ambassador to Honduras. A powerfully built six-footer who once played fullback for Princeton, Willauer found few facilities for recreation in Tegucigalpa, took up skindiving to keep himself in trim. In the blue depths off Honduras’ Caribbean coast, he hunted unsuccessfully for sunken pirate ships, learned to spear groupers, rockfish and tarpon.

Unscheduled Chores. Last March he learned that being the only proficient diver in the entire country let him in for chores the State Department had never visualized. He was called out to the Rio Quaccerique hole when a twelve-year-old boy* lost his grip on his inner tube and disappeared under the swirling currents. After an hour’s search he found the body lodged between some underwater rocks.

Since the Rio Quaccerique hole is thronged by picnickers and swimmers—mainly because there is nothing better near Tegucigalpa—Hondurans may well have to call on Willauer again. “It isn’t exactly in the line of ambassadorial duties,” said he last week, “but it is my duty as a human being.”

*His own son, also twelve, was smothered to death in 1953 by a sand cave-in at Nantucket.